May 24, 2023

Wild Stereo Microscopes - repair notes

I don't have a lot here. These microscopes are well made and I have not had any of mine knocked out of alignment.

Eyepiece swapping

I am not running my M5A with some Olympus eyepieces and I think it offers a considerable improvement. The eyepieces I am using are GSWH20X-H/12.5 with the "eyeglass" symbol indicating the offer high eye relief. I keep my eyeglasses on while using my microscope, so this of of considerable importance to me.

The tube size for the eyepieces is identical (30mm), so the Olympus eyepieces slip right in, but there is an issue. For some reason, Wild made the left/right eye focus adjustment part of the eyepiece assembly. Olympus did not, expecting (reasonably enough) that the microscope would provide this. This means that when you install the Olympus eyepieces on the Wild, you will have no ability to adjust the left and right eyes independently. It is vital to do so.

What I did was to carefully pull out the left eyepiece (in my case) until it was matched to the right (for me), then made a measurement. I then used my 3D printer to print a "washer" 2.2 mm thick that slips over the eyepiece and provides the required spacing. This works great for me, but if someone else wants to use the scope they may not find that it suits their eyes.

Focus rack disassembly

This was an exercise by mistake, but it is worth making some notes about. I wanted to remove the microscope body from the focusing rail and stand. My idea was to investigate where I might sandwich a piece of sheet metal to allow me to mount an illuminator. In the process, I inadvertantly took apart the focus slide, which has 16 precise rollers, which I then had to find. Reassembly was a painstaking business requiring quite a bit of patience.

If you rack the scope to the highest position, two silver flat head screws are exposed. Don't mess with these, they hold an L-shaped piece of metal that retains some hardened metal slides that are partt of the focus rail. Similarly, if you rack the scope to the lowest position, a single silver flat head screw is exposed. This retains a similar piece of metal, but it also performs another function, it is the stop that limits how far you can rack the scope down. If you remove it, you can rack the scope beyond that limit (and also get yourself into a lot of trouble, as I did).

Racking the scope all the way up exposes two 3mm hex screw that you want to remove to detach the scope body. I you remove the "stop" via the single silver flag head screw (best done with the scope on its side and perhaps removed from the base) you can carefully rack the scope down far enough to expose another pair of 3mm screws. If they aren't quite exposed you may need to "force" the rack by pushing with some force. Danger! You do not want to cause a big motion (where big is more than 1mm or so) or you may be gathering up small roller bearings and figuring out how to reassemble the slide (as I did). You want just enough space to barely access the two 3mm screws into the bottom of the scope body. It is even possible that this minimal motion may expose some of the rollers in the focus rack, so be on your toes and prepared to find and reinstall these.

There are also eight 2.5mm hex screws that hold the rack slide together.
There is no reason whatsoever to remove these.
There is also a single 2.5 mm hex screw directly behind the objective.
There is no reason to remove this either.

In my adventure I removed the top two 3mm screws, but never did remove the lower two 3mm screws. So I have not confirmed if removing the four of these is adequare to detach the head. There could be other screws hidden, which would make all of this even more difficult.


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Tom's Mineralogy Info / tom@mmto.org